Arduino2Fire: How to ignite flames on command with a microcontroller

3 min readOct 20, 2019

Have you ever wanted to light a fire on command? Do you need programmatic kindling for your latest pyrotechnic display? Do you just want to watch the world burn?

Well, this is the tutorial for you!

You will need:

Arduino
9V Battery
A transistor (we used a 2N3904)
220 ohm resistor
Christmas lights
Matches
Tape

1. The Fire-Starters

Credit to Violet Rose Zitola for the wonderful invention

We’ll be using the Christmas lights and the matches to make mini Fire-starters. When you pass a current through the Christmas light filament, it gets very hot, and lights the match.

Step 1. Cut an individual light off of the strand of Christmas lights and strip the ends off

Step 2. Gently smash the casing around the light with a hammer or something, exposing the filament.

Be very careful, the filament is fragile.

Step 3. Carefully tape a match to the Christmas light. Bend it so that the head of the match is nearly touching the filament.

Voila! You now have an electricity-to-fire converter. You can already plug in a 9V battery to the leads and set it on fire.

2. The Circuit

We want to use the Arduino as a switch to light the fire-starter on command. In order to do this, we use a transistor. The Arduino switches the transistor on, which pulls current through the 9V battery and into the fire-starter.

3. The Code

The code should be whatever you want it to be. Hook it up to a button or something, I dunno. This example code auto-starts a fire after 2 seconds.

void setup() {
  pinMode(7, OUTPUT);
  delay(2000);
  // Light it up
  digitalWrite(7, HIGH);
}void loop() {
}

Voila! You now have your very own Arduino2Fire interface. Use it wisely. Or not.

Arduino2Fire was created at the 2019 SF Stupid Shit No One Needs and Terrible Ideas Hackathon, as a part of a larger project by Violet Rose Zitola, Avi Romanoff, The Alchemist, Zach Latta, litbid, Seamus Seamus Seamus, Craig Hesling, Nick, and Caroline Hermans